The Politico has the details on Rudy Giuliani billing government agencies for security expenses while he was, uh, courting the future Mrs. Giuliani 3.0.

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”

The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.

Giuliani’s relationship with Nathan is old news now, and Giuliani regularly asks voters on the campaign trail to forgive his “mistakes.”

It’s also impossible to know whether the purpose of all the Hamptons trips was to see Nathan. A Giuliani spokeswoman declined to discuss any aspect of this story, which was explained in detail to her earlier this week.

Asked about this article after it was published on Wednesday, Giuliani said: “It’s not true.”

He said he had 24-hour security during his eight years as mayor because of “threats,” adding: ” I had nothing to do with the handling of their records, and they were handled, as far as I know, perfectly appropriately.”

The practice of transferring the travel expenses of Giuliani’s security detail to the accounts of obscure mayoral offices has never been brought to light, despite behind-the-scenes criticism from the city comptroller weeks after Giuliani left office.

The expenses first surfaced as Giuliani’s two terms as mayor of New York drew to a close in 2001, when a city auditor stumbled across something unusual: $34,000 worth of travel expenses buried in the accounts of the New York City Loft Board.

Well, I know that the Republicans want to let government pry into your bedroom and control your sex life, but I didn’t know that they were willing to pay for it.

I missed the GOP CNN-YouTube debate last night; I watched Olbermann and the first fifteen minutes of Criminal Minds before falling asleep. I did switch over during a commercial to catch a question about black-on-black crime and have Mitt Romney turn it into a thinly-veiled attack on gay marriage and a plea for more “moms and dads” in the inner city, an idea he apparently got from listening to his old Up With People LP’s.

Lots of other people watched the whole thing, including Michael Scherer, Josh Marshall, and Melissa, all of whom live-blogged it. Walter Shapiro has a wrap.

Rarely has a debate left me so troubled about the future of the nation. By now, I should have learned not to be shocked when Republicans like Mitt Romney, who spent the Vietnam War doing missionary work in France, pretend to believe that they have more expertise about waterboarding and other forms of torture than John McCain who spent five and a half years being abused and sometimes tortured in a North Vietnamese prison. I should have also learned not to be dismayed that the standard Republican position on immigration (McCain and Mike Huckabee excepted) now seems to be Emma Lazarus in reverse: “Take my tired and poor, please. I never want to see those shiftless bums again.”

No, what sent me into a free fall of depression was CNN’s instinct for the fatuous in choosing the debate questions. It is a disgrace that in a two-hour debate (it felt longer) there was not a single question about the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the power keg in Pakistan or Iran. The fault is not with the earnest YouTubers who sent in questions. The blame entirely rests with Anderson Cooper (a debate host who seemed incapable of asking a relevant followup question) and his CNN cohorts who seemed more concerned with goosing the ratings than with grasping the world that the next president will inherit.

If it’s any consolation at all, the questions at the Democratic debates have been just as calorie-free. Maybe the next debate should be hosted by Paula Abdul, Simon Cowell, and Joey Fatone.

Feel free to add your own $0.02.

Yet another candidate is the darling of the media. This time it’s Mike Huckabee who’s all over the airwaves and the pixels because … well, it’s his turn, I guess, and the pundits have already had their fascination with Mitt, Rudy, and Fred. (John McCain is so 2000.) Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker takes a look.

Huckabee. Funny, improbable name; funny, improbable candidate. How funny? Well, have a look at the first Huckabee for President campaign commercial, aired last week in Iowa and now ubiquitous on the Web. In it, the former governor of Arkansas trades straight-faced non sequiturs with Chuck Norris, the B-list action star. (Norris: “Mike Huckabee wants to put the I.R.S. out of business.” Huckabee: “When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the earth down.”) It’s an unusually entertaining spot—or, rather, meta-spot, the subtext of which is its own absurdity and, by extension, that of the whole genre.

How improbable? Well, up until the tail end of the summer, polls had Huckabee’s support for the Republican nomination hovering between zero and three per cent, usually closer to zero. In October, he broke into a trot, in November into a Gallup. In a poll released on Thanksgiving eve by Reuters/Zogby, he is in third place, at eleven per cent, nosing past not only John McCain but also Mitt Romney and narrowing the gap with the fading Fred Thompson to four points. In Iowa, where actual voting will occur on January 3rd, he has surged into what is essentially a tie with Romney for first place.

Huckabee, who at fifty-one is the youngest Republican running, spent half of his adult life as a Southern Baptist minister. Most of his support, so far, comes from the Evangelical Christian right. Yet to those who are not in that category his affect is curiously unthreatening. “I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at anybody,” he likes to say. His manner and appearance are reassuringly ordinary. When he smiles or laughs, which is often, his dimpled face looks interestingly like that of Wallace, of Wallace & Gromit.

[…]

To all appearances, Huckabee’s gentle rhetoric is a reflection of temperament, not a stylistic tactic. Arkansans caution that he is capable of churlishness. But his history suggests that he prefers consensus to confrontation, that he regards government as a tool for social betterment, and that he has little taste for war, cultural or otherwise. He seems to regard liberalism not as a moral evil, a mental disease, or a character flaw—merely as a political point of view he mostly disagrees with. That may not seem like much, but it makes a nice change. If talk radio hears about it, though, it might be enough to keep him from the top of the ticket.

We’re hearing a lot of talk about the election of 2008 being a “change” election, as if that makes it somehow different than every other election in the past. The idea, I suppose, is that the choice is between “stay the course” and “change,” but since everybody — in both parties — seems to agree that sticking with the policies of the current administration would be a disaster, the alternative has to be “change.” I can’t argue with much of that; but ironically, the candidates, especially the Republicans, don’t seem to represent much of a change. All of them pretty much represent the spectrum of the modern GOP; white, rich, anti-abortion, indifferent or hostile to gay rights, and completely sold on the idea that scaring the populace with warnings of invasions of brown-skinned people, be they Mexicans or Arabs, is the easiest way to win the election. And they all seem to be saying, “I’m not George W. Bush, but I stand for just about everything he does.” Some change.

The Democrats, as Bob Herbert pointed out, don’t seem to be much more different than the Republicans when it comes to really making a change. Very few of them are willing to take a stand that represents a monumental shift from the platforms that elected Bill Clinton in 1992 and that which Al Gore ran on in 2000. Perhaps they’re counting on the fact that more people voted for those candidates than their opponents (despite the unfortunate outcome for Mr. Gore), but once again, there’s nothing that shows a marked departure from the policies of the past. Yes, Barack Obama is the first African-American with a real chance at the nomination, and Hillary Clinton is the first woman, but both candidates have been going to great lengths to discount those qualities as being relevant in the election. (By doing so, that’s like saying “don’t think about elephants for the next ten minutes.” Guess what…you think about nothing else.) The only candidates who are talking about real change — radical, breathtaking, rafter-shaking change — are the ones like Mike Gravel and Ron Paul who stand no chance whatsoever of winning the nomination but are there by the grace of nature to provide us with a contrast to the rest of the field and give their fellow candidates someone to point to and say, “Hey, I’m not that guy.”

Calling the election of 2008 a “change” election by the pundits isn’t much different than the candidate on the stump who tells the crowd that “this election is the most important one in the history of the nation.” (Of course it is…to the candidate. Otherwise, why the hell pay attention to him?) But no one on either side has truly told us what the “change” will actually entail…or why we actually need it. We Americans have been remarkably “stay the course” voters for the last few generations, and the changes that have been made in the direction of the country, especially in the last century, have all been from forces outside the various presidential administrations, and the changes those administrations wrought were in response to those outside forces. By most reckonings, the current administration has responded poorly or not at all to the outside forces that have been coming at us. It is in recognizing those failings that we need to find leaders who will provide us with more than just the rhetoric of change but the preparation for the responses to the changes that will be forced upon us.

As John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, each generation is tested in some way; the growing pains of a new nation, civil war, the excesses of corporate greed, the dying throes of European imperialism, economic depression, fascism, the nuclear race, or religious zealotry. How we respond tells the world and posterity how much we have grown — or have not.

When Mitt Romney was asked if he would have a Muslim in his cabinet, his answer should have been, “As long as the person is qualified to do the job and agrees with my administration’s policies, I don’t care about his or her religion. Next question.”

Now was that so hard? After all, if he’s asking the country not to judge him based on his religion, why should he do that for anyone else? It’s not like the Republicans really care about someone’s religious affiliation, right? Right?

One poll says that the Republicans have a lead over Hillary Clinton. Another says that Sen. Clinton has a lead over every Republican. Both are from reliably neutral and scientific polling organizations — Zogby and Gallup — and both stake their reputation on their results, or they wouldn’t have published them.

Polling is an extremely statistic-laden science that most people, including yours truly, do not presume to understand or even bother reading. We just look at the headlines and take from them what we want…not unlike the Oracle of Delphi, whose cryptic revelations could be either good or bad depending on the agenda of the questioner. Pollsters themselves know that they are dealing with a shifting and detached electorate, and asking who they want for president eleven months before the general election is always problematic; the voters aren’t really paying attention to the presidential race and are probably answering the pollsters’ questions based on who’s name they’ve heard most recently. Trying to predict the outcome of an election without the first vote being cast is roughly equivalent to predicting the win-loss record of the 2008 Detroit Tigers based on the size of Brandon Inge’s biceps.

At this time in 2003, Howard Dean led the Democratic field, John Kerry was in third place, and several polls indicated that any Democrat would beat an embattled George W. Bush. We all know how that turned out. So read the polls and rejoice or weep for the moment, knowing that the next one will be just as certainly enigmatic as the last one.